Chapter: 1: The Problem of Nature and Purpose
Chapter 3: Mind in Nature
In Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead wrote of the scientific materialism stemming from the seventeenth century:
It has held its own as the guiding principle of scientific studies ever since. It is still reigning. Every university in the world organizes itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organizing the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival.
And yet -- it is quite unbelievable. This conception of the universe is surely framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities.1
Scientific materialism, according to Whitehead, is a misrepresentation of the cosmos because it is based on the "fallacy of misplaced
concreteness."2 This fallacy of misplaced concreteness is simply the confusion of abstractions with concrete reality. It is the tendency to take our mental constructs and imaginative models of the world, such as those of the machine, wave or particle, as though they corresponded exactly to the world itself. This is an understandable temptation since we have to simplify things in order even to begin to understand them.
But we do not always heed Whitehead’s exhortation first to seek
simplicity and then to mistrust it.3 We easily do the first, but tend to balk at the second. I would suggest that we fail to mistrust our over-
simplifications for the same reasons that we are inclined toward the epistemology of control. Somehow and for some reason we fear giving up our sense of mastery over the universe. But we do so at great peril to our cosmology and to our general vision of things.
Whitehead’s critique of scientific materialism is that it is too abstract.
This indictment perhaps sounds strange, since if anything seems concrete it is the collection of allegedly irreducible particles of matter out of which nature is composed according to the materialist’s
philosophy. What could be more concrete than atoms in the void? The elegant simplicity of the atomist philosophy, or its contemporary equivalents in an updated particle physics or molecular biology, may easily seduce us into the assumption that bits of matter or indivisible mechanisms are the bedrock foundation of reality. And yet, on more careful analysis, they turn out to be "high abstractions."
Why do mindless chunks of matter not qualify for being the ultimate
"concrete" constituents of nature? Simply because they are the product of the scientific method’s prescinding from certain aspects of the
universe with which it is incapable of dealing. These aspects that are left behind (by the use of the machine model and the still dominant particle model) are part of the concrete fabric of the universe, and so any
adequate cosmology should advert to them as well. The neglected
elements I am referring to are the "qualitative" aspects of things, aspects which escape the net of mechanistic and quantitative modes of
understanding. More specifically they are the aspects of beauty, value and importance, none of which fall within the realm of ordinary scientific discussion.
Of course these aspects of the universe that are left out of scientific discussion will be looked upon by the materialist as epiphenomenal, as our own subjective desires projected onto the blank neutrality of the universe. Value seems to fall within the same arena as the so-called
"secondary qualities" isolated by classical physics and the philosophy of John Locke. Secondary qualities are those aspects of things which seem to depend for their existence upon the perceiver. Color, taste, smell, sound and touch all require an experiencing subject in which to reside, and so they apparently do not have any "objective" reality to them. They are derived only from the perceiver who cloaks the objects with
secondary qualities. Meanwhile the object itself onto which the secondary qualities are projected is said to be made up of "primary qualities." Primary qualities are those features of objects that allegedly exist independently of any experiencing subject. The object’s mass, position and momentum, for example, do not seem to depend upon my being present to perceive them. They exist independently of my
experience; they endure throughout the process of accidental changes, and, therefore, they seem to be more real, more concrete than the secondary qualities. Scientific materialism usually holds that primary qualities are the concretely real foundation of things and that secondary qualities are the frothy result of our projecting elements of unreliable subjectivity onto them.
The important implication of this distinction of primary from secondary qualities (itself rooted in the mind/matter dualism which we looked at earlier) is that it provides the cosmological basis for a denial that there is any intrinsic meaning in the universe independent of meaning-creating individuals. It has become very easy after the seventeenth century to situate the whole notion of meaning or value in the same context as secondary qualities. The values that we cherish and that give our lives whatever meaning they may have seem to depend for their precarious existence upon the sensitivity of evaluators. Our sense of the importance of things, events, persons, and of the universe itself, seems to share with secondary qualities the characteristic of being totally subjective and arbitrary. Accordingly meaning does not appear to be intrinsic to the universe. The cosmos seems inherently vacant of purpose, and teleology is apparently the mere product of our own valuations.
The restriction of value to the realm of subjectivity depends upon a prior separation of our consciousness from the cosmos. This separation has recently been challenged not only by philosophy but also by
developments in science itself. Hence our discussion of the issue of purpose in the universe must inquire about the possibility of some other assessment of the relation of mind to nature. It is especially in the
thought of Alfred North Whitehead that we may find such an alternative.
Reality as Process
According to Whitehead reality is process. Evolutionary theory has impressed this fact upon us, but it is also one of the most obvious
conclusions of modern physics. Ages ago Heraclitus weepingly declared
that all is in flux. The Buddha made transiency central to his vision of reality. In this century Henri Bergson taught us how central process is to our inner and outer experience. And even more recently Whitehead has emphasized the dynamic, processive nature both of reality as a whole and also of its constituent elements. According to Whitehead the universe is made up of moments that become and then perish. These moments are linked together in various kinds of series or patterns that build up into all the various objects of our experience. But beneath the apparent stability of these entities there are events, happenings,
occasions. In short, there is process.4
Today quantum physics has compelled many scientists to conclude that process is the most fundamental fact. Previously we supposed, with materialism, that only the solid is real. We had confused concreteness with solidity. We now know that solidity is itself secondary and not primary. Physical reality, including the most obdurate objects, is composed of wave patterns, vibrations, energy events, electronic happenings. The excessive abstractness of the materialist view of physical reality lies partly in its unawareness of the dynamic
constituency of even the most stationary solid object. Beneath the flow of life and even the placid facade of the Rocky Mountains there lies a story of process. It is a story in which the energy events that compose natural phenomena have engaged themselves in a dance of becoming and perishing, inheriting and "feeling" each other for millions of years.
It is this process, and not some imaginary impermeable particles or inert stuff, that gives rise to the rocks as well as to life and mind. All physical objects are composed of patterns of process. If we try to Imagine that there must be something solid beneath the process, then this is because we are still being tricked by the assumptions of common sense and classical physics upon which materialism rests.
As Bergson taught us half a century ago, we need not look beyond our own personal experience to have sufficient evidence of the utterly processive nature of reality.
Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. . . . . . .
Thus our personality shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before.5
But, as the Buddha also taught, there is something about us that has an aversion to the perpetual perishing of each ‘‘now." We have a tendency to cling to the present or the past, the same tendency that leads to the illusion that there is a final solidity to things. It is a tendency analogous to the one portrayed by Sartre, whereby we flee from our freedom into the deterministic world of objects. We do not easily accept the idea of a world in process, partly because process entails perishability.
The flow of our own personalities through time cannot be divorced from the general context of the universe on which their becoming is borne.
Bergson was himself dualistic in his divorcing mind and life from matter. But he was correct in his situating our own becoming in the stream of a universal becoming. Whitehead has radicalized this insight of Bergson’s and has eliminated any dualism. He has emphasized the continuity between our own becoming and that of physical reality. We are in utter continuity with the processive universe.
If we take this continuity seriously then we must abolish the dualistic tendency to read our mental activity as though it were not also part of the inner essence of nature. Scientific thought, under the impact of dualism, has simply assumed that mental occurrences are not part of the cosmic arena, that mentality and nature belong to completely different realms. However, as Whitehead emphasizes:
. . . this sharp division between mentality and nature has no ground in our fundamental observation. We find ourselves living within nature. . . . We should conceive mental operations as among the factors which make up the constitution of nature.6
I suspect that most of us have been so influenced by dualism that we find it quite difficult to think of our mental activity as part of the occurrences that make up nature. We somehow feel that our minds are outside of nature. And this feeling of mental exile is understandable as long as we conceive of nature itself as mindless. But it is precisely this assumption of the intrinsic mindlessness of nature that Whitehead asks us to question. Any absolutely clear line of demarcation that segregates
our mental functioning from its cosmic matrix is purely arbitrary -- indeed an illusion, a vestige of dualistic mythology.
Scientific materialism itself denies that there are any arbitrary breaks in nature. Everything is on a continuum with everything else. Everything that exists is explicable in terms of the mass-energy plenum. Our mental processes are also in principle fully explicable in terms of matter and energy. Seemingly, therefore, materialists are monists, since for them reality is reducible to the one realm of the physical. They apparently reject any dualism that would give to mind a separate ontological status.
However, although they are monists metaphysically speaking, in that they reduce reality to only one kind of stuff, they remain dualists in their epistemology, that is, in their view of knowledge. They demand that we be objective in our understanding of nature, and this objectivity requires that we keep our subjectivity detached from the object, nature. The scientist’s own mind must remain at a distance from the object being investigated in order that an "objective" perspective become possible.
This divorce of the scientific subject’s mind from the object being examined amounts to an epistemological dualism.
The attempt by materialists to hold together a metaphysical monism of matter with an epistemological dualism of mind over against matter seems to be incoherent. For on the one hand the materialist philosophy asserts that beings with minds evolved out of the cosmic process and, therefore, are continuous with nature. But on the other hand the same philosophy maintains that the minds of these beings are separate from the natural world during any valid act of knowing. It is very difficult to piece these contradictories together from the point of view of logic.
Furthermore, materialism’s epistemological dualism leaves open the door for the "existential" alienation of the subject from its cosmic context. It establishes a way of thinking that eventuates in the sense, expressed earlier by Klemke that I am a stranger in an indifferent and hostile universe. The epistemological dualism implicit in scientific materialism inevitably leads to the feeling that nature is without purpose and that my own conscious life lacks any grounding in the universe.
The consensus of much recent thought, however, a great deal of it coming from physicists themselves, is that mind is intrinsic rather than extrinsic to nature. The universe is permeated not only with process but also with mentality. As in the ancient mythic visions, our own minds actually belong in the context of the cosmos.7
Physicist David Bohm, who dares to speculate on what he considers to be the philosophical implications of modern physics, asks whether
thought itself might not be part of reality as a whole. He challenges us to ask: ". . . how are we to think coherently of a single, unbroken, flowing actuality of existence as a whole, containing both thought
(consciousness) and external reality as we experience it?"8 . . . to meet the challenge before us our notions of
cosmology and of the general nature of reality must have room in them to permit a consistent account of
consciousness. Vice versa, our notions of consciousness must have room in them to understand what it means for its content to be ‘reality as a whole.’ The two sets of notions together should then be such as to allow for an understanding of how reality and consciousness are related.9
Relativity theory and quantum physics in the present century have given rise to a great deal of speculation like that of Bohm’s. Much of this speculation has concluded that the scientific observer is not a detached spectator dualistically split off from nature. Rather the observer is really a participant whose mental activity cannot be separated from, and
indeed inevitably intersects with, the objects being investigated. Physics itself seems to have blurred the line drawn by dualism between subject and object.
A more philosophical way to vanquish the dualism of mind and nature is to see them both as aspects of a unified cosmic process in which all the components of becoming are "mental." According to Whitehead
something analogous to what we experience as mentality, something like "feeling" or "perception," is present throughout the natural world, not just in man, animals and plants, but also in the most fundamental constituents of the physical world. There is a "subjective" aspect to all
"actual entities."10
Now it will no doubt seem to the reader who is unfamiliar with
Whiteheadian thought that perceptivity, experience and mentality may be aspects of human and to some extent biological phenomena in
general, but what about inanimate nature? Is it legitimate to hold, as we are doing here, that mentality is pervasive throughout the universe? Or is it not much more sensible to assume that mentality appears only very late and very locally in the evolutionary story? This may be granted if
we are talking about mentality in the mode of human consciousness.
Certainly consciousness does not exist at the level of atoms and
electrons, nor does reflective self-awareness seem to appear in evolution until the human species comes onto the scene. But there is good reason for holding that mentality in the form of some sort of rudimentary
"feeling" may be present at the level of the energy-events that give rise to electrons and atoms. For if our minds are continuous with the rest of nature (as even materialists acknowledge in their monistic metaphysics), then in some sense mentality is already present in the very stuff of the universe from which we have evolved. If we place matter and man on a continuum, one very fruitful way to understand ourselves is to do so as far as possible by specifying our material make-up. But it is also
possible to understand a great deal about the nature of physical reality by beginning from the other end of the continuum. Since matter and mind are, after all, on the same unbroken spectrum, we may understand each partially in terms of the other. For this reason an understanding of mentality and its activity is not superfluous to our understanding of the whole universe.11
It is possible to understand a great deal about mind by analyzing it in terms of its molecular basis. It is also possible to reach a more concrete understanding of physical reality by recognizing its mental aspects. But how can we maintain something so apparently anthropomorphic? For at the very least mentality is by nature an experiential occurrence. And experience begins with feeling. When we say that the universe is mental, that it is composed of moments of feeling, it obviously appears as
though we are projecting our own human experience onto something which is non-experiential. Is this not an instance of the "pathetic fallacy"?
In response, we must first re-emphasize that we are using the terms mentality, feeling, experience, and perceptivity in an analogous sense.
Something like what we call feeling, perceiving, remembering, desiring, anticipating, liking and disliking must characterize every constituent aspect of reality. This does not necessarily mean that rocks have
feelings. Rather it means that all objects, including inanimate ones, are composed of moments or occasions which have feeling as a constituent aspect of their actuality. The world of process is made up of units of becoming whose very essence is feeling. As Charles Hartshorne has suggested, it may be that feeling of feeling is an ultimate principle, applicable to deity and every other singular actuality."12
Science, of course, is unable by itself to penetrate the inner privacy or
"subjectivity" of the moments of feeling that make up reality. Science always remains outside in its abstracting from the interiority of nature’s constituent occasions of experience. And for that reason our
terminology will inevitably sound foreign to those attuned to a scientific idiom. Therefore, it will strain our credulity at first to be told that the most concrete things in nature are not dead, inert, mindless. But how else would our world hang together as a universe unless things have a feeling for one another? To posit a subjective capacity to feel at the heart of all the moments that make up the cosmic process goes beyond the limits of scientific ways of thinking, but it is not a position that in any way conflicts with a coherent cosmology. Science, after all, usually deals with aggregates rather than with the fundamental units of reality of which I am speaking. And it is true, of course, that aggregates made up of concrete moments of feeling exhibit macroscopically inert qualities.
A rock for example may legitimately be called inanimate and mindless.
But the ultimate components of rocks or grains of sand or molecules and atoms are series of occurrences bound together by a feeling for one another. These series of occasions of experience (as Whitehead calls them) build up into patterns which give the outward appearance to our dull senses of firmness and immobility. With our senses we are not able to perceive directly the dynamic dance of mutual feeling that constitutes the foundation of the apparent stability of things. But it is reasonable to infer from the fact of nature’s intrinsic continuity with our own mental experience that there must be at least a rudimentary type of feeling that binds all things to one another. What better word than "feeling" can we employ to indicate the power of attraction that binds the multiplicity of occasions into the organic unity of a universe?
Modern physics supports us in our proposal that the constituents of nature are not the lifeless particles that we tend to imagine as tiny
versions of inert chunks of matter. The world of submicroscopic physics is so utterly different from the one that we observe in our ordinary
experience that words and pictures fail us when we try to imagine what it is like in its inner constituency. If our suggestion sounds strange that this world of the infinitesimal is made up of feelings, then this is no stranger than any other proposals as to how to understand it. In fact, though, there are very good positive reasons to make our own
experiencing the central model for understanding the physical world. If this seems like the pathetic fallacy, then, Hartshorne says, it is less abstract than the "prosaic fallacy" of materialist monism.13